Balkanalije: odraščanje v času tranzicij

Balkanalia (Growing Up in Times of Transition)

A personal tale of growing up similar to the one told by Marjane Satrapi in Persepolis.

Fantastic moments in real situations with a careful eye for detail as found in the works of Shaun Tan.

Bearing witness and telling the story as meticulously as Joe Sacco.

Fragmented approach to storytelling through intimate individual portrayals that in the end make a whole like in Maira Kalman’s The Principles of Uncertainty.

Family traumas turned into works of art and animals as metaphors of human condition as in the works of Art Spiegelman.

Innovative and daring, with an abundance of new approaches like Christoph Niemann.

Balkanalia, Growing Up in Times of Transition is an autobiographical graphic novel, a coming-of-age story set in an immigrant working class family during the bloody break-up of the author's socialist homeland of Yugoslavia into a global paradigm of transition and privatisation.

In this story, nothing is ordinary in an ordinary child’s life. The author, an artist, is a daughter of a working-class family. Her father used to be a shepherd and her mother weaved carpets. They traded their rural Bosnian, Muslim surroundings for an urban Slovenian, Catholic setting and became internal migrants in a country that celebrated working class above all. The girl’s homeland had fallen apart, yet its remains are the only solid elements of a future worth striving for. The words of the immigrant child make it obvious that she has always known that she belonged nowhere. But she did belong to people, ideas and ideals. So, home could be anywhere.

Two media, separate but whole, intrinsically joined and enriching each other. A story of horizons, war, home, principles and family, told in an original and honest voice.

Awards

MGIP International Book Award 2015

Reviews

The author weaves the internal world with real events, family history with national history, realism, surrealism, symbolism, popular culture, celebrities, and various ideologies, using all this to create a bizarre collage full of unusual figures. The narration is driven by numerous intentional paradoxes, fun excesses, brutal passages, unerotic nudity and oxymora.

Mladina

In Balkanalia, we are mostly faced by sepia-hued full-page illustrations complemented by brief written notes. These, however, are not merely there to illustrate the illustrations, as the illustrations don’t just illustrate the text – each medium has a voice of its own and speaks of what it’s able to. We must not forget, after all, that this is an intimate autobiography with a social focus.

Koridor

Practically throughout the book, the reader encounters images of feet that have sprouted roots. Or perhaps trees that are upside down? Kentrić’s painting style is realist, however, the pictures are also touched by magic, by the world of dreams – human bodies grow wolf heads, a sheep bares its sharp, pointy teeth … Yes, Balkanalia are also a meditation on identity, on belonging, on the concept of homeland …